Dr. Don Snow is director of the Language and Culture Center at Duke Kunshan University. He is the author of More Than a Native Speaker: An Introduction for Volunteers Teaching English Abroad (2006)and From Language Learner to Language Teacher: An Introduction to Teaching English as a Foreign Language (2007). His work on intercultural communication and English teaching includes the journal article “English Teaching, Intercultural Competence, and Critical Incident Exercises” in Language and Intercultural Communication (2015) and the textbook, Encounters with Westerners: Improving Skills in English and Intercultural Communication (2014). This year, Don was featured on TESOL’s 50 at 50 list, a distinction that recognizes “a significant contribution to the TESOL profession within the past 50 years. The leaders were selected by [TESOL’s] 50th Anniversary Advisory Team from more than 120 nominees.” The ICIS leadership team congratulates these outstanding TESOL professionals and joins TESOL International Association in recognizing their leadership in the association and their development of “English language teaching and learning into a profession that touches the lives of students and educators worldwide.”

How did you get involved in TESOL?

My life in English language teaching (ELT) began with a 1-year job teaching conversational English at the YMCA in Taiwan. Prior to that, I had no real experience with language teaching, and nothing in my experience as a language learner suggested I had any particular calling for this profession. However, during that first year in Taiwan, I finally began to have some success as a language learner, first with Mandarin and then a bit of Taiwanese, and I also gradually began learning something about language teaching. I liked the experience enough to stay on teaching in Taiwan for a second year, and later decided to get a Master of Arts in ELT at Michigan State University. It was during my 2 years there that I learned about the TESOL organization and first became a member.

How did you get involved in the study of intercultural communication?

Even before going to Taiwan, I had learned a little about intercultural communication (IC) through my experience working with international programs at the College of Wooster in Ohio. However, IC didn’t become a major part of my life until I returned to China in the early 1990s, after receiving my PhD in Chinese linguistics. From 1991 to 1993 I taught in a special program at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou that prepared Chinese scholars for study and research abroad. I felt that in addition to improving their English, these scholars could benefit from some preparation for life in a foreign culture. So, I found a number of critical incident exercises in a textbook called The Culture Puzzle (Levine, Baxter, & McNulty, 1987) and started building lessons around them. I quickly found that students responded well to the exercises. I also had a sense that these had some value for building intercultural competence. Consequently, I started collecting stories of incidents that I could turn into teaching materials, and I also started putting myself through a long self-study program on IC. The result was finally a textbook calledEncounters with Westerners (Snow, 2014) that was first published by Shanghai Foreign Language Press in 2003.

How do you define intercultural communication for ELT?

I feel it is important to make a distinction between building IC skills and learning about other cultures. Clearly it is desirable for English language learners (ELLs) to learn about as many other cultures as possible, not only the cultures of English-speaking countries but also the cultures of other groups of people they are likely to interact with. However, it is also clearly impossible to expect ELLs to build an in-depth knowledge of a large range of cultures, and it is virtually inevitable that they will at times need to interact with people whose cultural backgrounds are unfamiliar to them. To me, the core of IC lies here—developing knowledge and skills that enable one to better manage communication and interaction with people whose cultures are relatively unfamiliar.

What are your recent projects and why did you undertake them?

From 2012 to 2014, I revised the Encounters with Westerners (Snow, 2014) textbook. To be honest, I did this in part because the publisher wanted an updated edition, but I also took this as an opportunity to improve the textbook, incorporating new things I had learned since the first edition, while also catching up on the IC literature.

As some readers may know, each unit in Encounters is built around open-ended critical incident exercises, and these exercises are intended to help learners develop the habit of interpreting cross-cultural encounters more mindfully and carefully. While I have never really doubted that these exercises were beneficial for students, it had always disturbed me that the theoretical foundation for open-ended exercises was not as clear as it was for close-ended versions (known as intercultural sensitizers). I was also bothered that the intercultural communication literature often does not discuss the interpretation process in much detail. To be more precise, while the literature does discuss many of the factors that affect judgments we make when we encounter people from unfamiliar cultures—ethnocentrism and so forth—it says little about the process by which our minds make such interpretive judgments. The result was that I was drawn into reading the psychology literature on how the human mind makes decisions. This, in turn, drove me to start working on a set of articles examining the habits of thought that are built by open-ended critical exercises as well as the ways in which interpretive judgments in intercultural encounters are likely to be affected both by the subconscious mind and by feelings. One article, “English Teaching, Intercultural Competence, and Critical Incident Exercises” (Snow, 2015), has recently been published. Two additional articles are currently under review.

What advice do you have for teachers of English as an additional language?

The main thing is that we should bring IC into English classes as much as possible. The situations that call for use of a foreign language—especially English—almost always involve IC. If our goal is to prepare students for communicative language use, we should not only teach students the tool, English, we should also teach them about the dynamics of the intercultural situations in which they will have to use it.

References

Levine, D., Baxter, J., & McNulty, P. (1987). The culture puzzle: Cross-cultural communication for English as a second language. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Snow, D. (2006) More than a native speaker: An introduction for volunteers teaching English abroad, revised edition. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Snow, D. (2007). From language learner to language teacher: An introduction to teaching English as a foreign language. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Snow, D. (2014). Encounters with Westerners: Improving skills in English and intercultural communication, revised edition. Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Snow, D. (2015). English teaching, intercultural competence, and critical incident exercises. Language and Intercultural Communication, 15(2), 285–299.

Natalia Balyasnikova is the co-editor of this newsletter.